September 8, 2025
Clanker is a slur for robots and artificial intelligence software. The term has been used in ‘Star Wars’ media, first appearing in the franchise’s 2005 video game ‘Star Wars: Republic Commando.’ In 2025, the term became widely used to discuss distaste for machines ranging from delivery robots to large language models. This trend has been attributed to anxiety around the negative societal effects of artificial intelligence.
Whereas AI slop describes low-quality output from artificial intelligence, clanker belittles the underlying robotic systems. While other science fiction media includes pejoratives for robots, such as ‘skinjob’ in ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘toaster’ in ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ clanker is believed to have gained popularity because its usage is intuitive and flexible.
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August 11, 2025
Slopsquatting is a type of cybersquatting. It is the practice of registering a non-existent software package name that a large language model (LLM) may hallucinate in its output, whereby someone unknowingly may copy-paste and install the software package without realizing it is fake. Attempting to install a non-existent package should result in an error, but some have exploited this for their gain in the form of typosquatting.
In 2023, security researcher Bar Lanyado noted that LLMs hallucinated a package named ‘huggingface-cli. While this name is identical to the command used for the command-line version of HuggingFace Hub, it is not the name of the package. The software is correctly installed with the code pip install -U ‘huggingface_hub[cli].’ Lanyado tested the potential for slopsquatting by uploading an empty package under this hallucinated name. In three months, it had received over 30,000 downloads. The hallucinated packaged name was also used in the README file of a repo for research conducted by Alibaba.
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October 11, 2024
Slop is low-quality media—including writing and images—made using generative artificial intelligence technology. Coined in the 2020s, the term has a derogatory connotation akin to ‘spam.’ It has been variously defined as ‘digital clutter,’ ‘filler content produced by AI tools that prioritize speed and quantity over substance and quality,’ and ‘shoddy or unwanted AI content in social media, art, books and, increasingly, in search results.’ Jonathan Gilmore, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, describes the ‘incredibly banal, realistic style’ of AI slop as being ‘very easy to process.’
After Hurricane Helene, an AI-generated image of a girl holding a puppy while sitting in a boat floating on flooded waters circulated among Republicans, who used as evidence of failures or the Biden administration to respond to the disaster. U.S. Senator Mike Lee posted the image of the girl on social media before later deleting it. The image apparently originated on the Trump-centered Internet forum Patriots.win.
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April 19, 2024
The Mexican filter is a yellow-colored or sepia filter that is sometimes employed in films and television productions to visually represent scenes set in Mexico, as well as other Latin American and South Asian countries. It has been criticized for tending to wash out the faces of people with darker skin, and for stereotyping the countries it depicts. Notable examples of Mexican filter use include: ‘Traffic’ (2000), ‘Breaking Bad’ (2008), ‘Extraction’ (2020), ‘Saw X’ (2023).
The use of yellow color filters for Mexico began around 2000, when technical advancements in film-making allowed the easier use of color filters. Traditionally used to convey a sense of heat and aridity, the use of yellow color filters for Mexico eventually became a trope. It has been disputed that temperature is a good justification for using the Mexican filter given that hot cities in the United States are rarely if ever depicted with yellow filters.
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April 19, 2023
Sheng nu (‘leftover ladies’) is a derogatory Chinese term for women who remain unmarried in their late twenties and beyond. Most prominently used in China, the term has also been used colloquially to refer to women in India, North America, and other parts of Asia. The term compares unmarried women to leftover food and has gone on to become widely used in the mainstream media focusing on the negative connotations and positive reclamation of the term.
While initially backed and disseminated by pro-government media in 2007, the term eventually came under criticism from government-published newspapers two years later. The equivalent term for men, ‘guang gun’ meaning ‘bare branches,’ is used to refer to men who do not marry and thus do not add ‘branches’ to the family tree. Similarly, ‘shengnan’ (‘leftover men’) has also been used, though this term is not as commonly used as ‘leftover women’ in Chinese society and single males reaching a certain age will often be labeled as either ‘golden bachelors’ or ‘diamond single man.’
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February 25, 2023
Pseudolaw consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that are claimed to be based on accepted law or legal doctrine, but which deviate significantly from most conventional understandings of law and jurisprudence, or which originate from non-existent statutes or legal principles the advocate or adherent incorrectly believes exist.
Canadian legal scholar Donald J. Netolitzky defined pseudolaw as ‘a collection of legal-sounding but false rules that purport to be law,’ a definition that distinguishes pseudolaw from arguments that fail to conform to existing laws such as novel arguments or an ignorance of precedent in case law.
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December 18, 2022
A mumpsimus [muhmp-suh-muhs] is a ‘traditional custom obstinately adhered to however unreasonable it may be,’ or ‘someone who obstinately clings to an error, bad habit or prejudice, even after the foible has been exposed and the person humiliated; also, any error, bad habit, or prejudice clung to in this fashion.’
The term originates in the story of a priest using the nonsense Latin word ‘mumpsimus’ instead of ‘sumpsimus’ (lit. ‘we have taken’) when giving mass, and refusing to be corrected on the matter. The word may refer to either the speaker or their habit.
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September 15, 2022
A pretendian (portmanteau of pretend and Indian) is a person who has falsely claimed Indigenous identity by claiming to be a citizen of a Native American or Indigenous Canadian tribal nation, or to be descended from Native ancestors. The term is a pejorative colloquialism, and if used without evidence could be considered defamatory.
As a practice, being a pretendian is considered an extreme form of cultural appropriation, especially if that individual then asserts that they can represent, and speak for, communities they do not belong to. It is sometimes also referred to as a form of ethnic fraud or race shifting.
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September 1, 2022
A stroad is a pejorative portmanteau of street and road that was coined by urban planner Charles Marohn in 2011 to describe paved traffic structures in the U.S. that are a bad combination of two types of vehicular pathways.
According to Marohn, a stroad is part street—which he describes as a ‘complex environment where life in the city happens,’ with pedestrians, cars, buildings close to the sidewalk for easy accessibility, with many (property) entrances / exits to and from the street, and with spaces for temporary parking and delivery vehicles—and part road, which he describes as a ‘high-speed connection between two places’ with wide lanes, limited entrances and exits, and which are generally straight or have gentle curves.
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January 5, 2022
Italian Sounding is a marketing phenomenon consisting of words and images, color combinations (the Italian tricolor) and geographical references for brands that are evocative of Italy to promote and market products – especially but not exclusively agri-food – that are not actually Made in Italy.
The phenomenon is described by the Office of the Ministry of Economic Development (MISE) called ‘Directorate General for the Protection of Industrial Property – Italian Patent and Trademark Office’ (DGTPI-UIBM).
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August 12, 2021
A gopnik is a member of a slavic subculture stereotyped as prone to hooliganism. Gopota are often seen squatting in groups ‘in court’ or ‘doing the crab’ with their heels on the ground, a behavior attributed to Soviet prison culture and avoidance of sitting on the cold ground.
The subculture of gopota has its roots in the late Russian Empire and evolved during the 20th century in many cities in the Soviet Union. By the late 2010s, it had faded for the most part, although youth gangs (such as the A.U.E.) that resemble gopota still exist in Russia and in other Slavic and Baltic countries.
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August 1, 2021
Grand Poobah is a satirical term derived from the name of the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘The Mikado’ (1885). In this comic opera, Pooh-Bah holds numerous exalted offices, including ‘First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral … Archbishop … Lord Mayor’ and ‘Lord High Everything Else.’
The name has come to be used as a mocking title for someone self-important or locally high-ranking and who either exhibits an inflated self-regard or who has limited authority while taking impressive titles. American writer William Safire wrote that ‘everyone assumes [the name] Pooh-Bah merely comes from [W. S. Gilbert] combining the two negative exclamations Pooh! plus Bah!, typical put-downs from a typical bureaucrat.’
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